A Chinese helicopter arrives to rescue some of the 52 passengers trapped for more than a week on the icebound Russian research ship MV Akademik Shokalskiyin on Thursday. (AP/Australasian Antarctic Expedition)

By Rick Manning

As originally published in the Washington Examiner.

You may have heard about the Russian ship trapped in Antarctic ice. Various ice-breakers from other nations have attempted to free it, but to no avail. The ship is encased in tons of floating sea ice.

What many in the mainstream media have failed to mention is that the ship was attempting to study global warming at the South Pole.

Along for the ride were some high-roller eco-tourists wanting to see some glaciers dramatically breaking off and falling into the sea.

After the researchers and tourists were rescued, the ship’s crew stayed behind in the hopes of piloting their ship once it breaks free of the ice flow.

Journalists reporting on this decision have speculated that these sailors may have to wait until the spring thaw to break free.

Only problem? Antarctica is south of the equator, and it is now summer there. In fact, it is the equivalent of early July. That means it will be a long wait till spring.

Faced with the past 17 years in which the planet has failed to warm, those who think January is winter in the Antarctic must realize this means the planet hasn’t warmed since the Y2K crisis consumed us back in the 20th century.

It means that a senior in high school has never actually experienced global warming, even as their teachers have taught them that it is fact.

It means that when futurist, scientist and author Isaac Asimov was predicting a global ice age in 1979, it was only 18 years until the “catastrophic” warming halted for an almost equally long period.

In the summer of 2013, a number of green sailors were trapped in the supposed non-existent Arctic ice even though reports were rampant that rather than subsiding, the ice at the North Pole was expanding rapidly.

Eco-scientists and tourists apparently believed it was just climate-change denier propaganda. Then they got trapped in it. Now, six months later, a different group of eco-scientists and tourists met the same fate in the south.

At some point, you’d think these supposed scholars would quit trying to justify their failed computer models and accept the fact that the Earth’s climate does change.

Sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes it gets colder, and when a warming trend has been broken by an almost equally long time period of stable temperatures, perhaps it is time to put some different assumptions into the climate-change models.

Otherwise, the climate-change propagandists just might find themselves frozen out of the debate like that global warming eco-cruise trapped in a summer ice flow.

Rick Manning is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.